Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Categories

I was a teenager when Pokemon was big with the younger kids. I didn’t get it. I thought it was a colossal waste of time and could not imagine the appeal. So I just rolled my eyes when Pokemon Go was released, thinking it would be one of those newfangled games for the young ones.

Then my kids got interested. Really interested. And being the invested mother that I am, I took one for the parenting team and downloaded it on my phone.

This game has been SO much fun, not just for my children, but for me, and in such unexpected ways, that I wanted to share with any other Pokemon Curmudgeons out there on the interwebs

1. This game gets me out of my rut and shows me places in my own city that I’ve never seen before. Just by my work? Two awesome murals that are just there, painted on the side of a building, a building I walk by every day but never noticed before. And it turns out the cemeteries are great places for pokestops, and there happens to be one right by my work. So I am getting to be on speaking terms with the local dead, and curious about their lives. Plus I love catching whatever morbid Pokemon hang out in cemeteries. I am finding all kinds of small business and quirky nooks and crannies that make my city unique. And I just didn’t see them before.

2. In my work as a hypnotherapist, oftentimes a turning point comes for my client when they begin to see the same old things in a new light. Changing the narrative, layering something new, is all part of the work of hypnotherapy, and it can be literally life-changing. Pokemon go adds this whole layer of a magical reality on top of regular life. It turns an ordinary trip to the grocery store into a hunt for magical creatures, and it’s odd, but somehow, at least for me, this also gets me thinking about my own life and my own problems in a new way. Like a backdoor for creative thinking. Plus, so much fun.

3. With my job I basically sit all day. I went from sedentary, 2-3k steps a day, to over 10k steps a day, pretty much overnight. Walking is so much FUN when you are collecting all your magical items and hatching eggs!